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Schlagwort-Archive: du bist deutschland

A while ago, I explained how we have fewer adbreaks here in german TV. Of course, we cought up a bit over the years, but it’s still a socialist paradise in comparison. But there is also of course a distinct… german‐ness to the ads I was seeing as a kid and young adult. Even when these ads were supposed to take place in a big city in the USA:

I, and probably a lot of my german friends were utterly convinced that this is America. Cars, cool people, sunshine, car telephones, the works. Nothing in this ad struck me as anything but American.

Boy was I wrong. My girlfriend insisted that all the US kids were constantly weirded out by this odd german ad. How can this be? Nothing german ever makes it across the pond, right? Well, I went to the Internet and found out that this is indeed a work by Pahnke & Partners. („Pahnke“ being such a cliché german name, I still think it must be a subsidy of Pahlgruber & Söhne)

Still, we also had ads that were much more distinctively german. They then mangled Mozart for fun and profit (with very subjective measures of fun):

(„Nogger“ is, by the way, named after it’s nougat core. Pop culture germany was and often still is ignorant when it comes to how to handle race issues. That slogan roughly translates to „get a Nogger on“, and it still boggles my mind.)

So, modern german advertising has understood how to do viral buzz. And some agencies are really good at turning a brand around.

I live in Berlin, and Berliners love to complain about the BVG, the state‐owned company that runs public transit. In fact, Ton Steine Scherben, the band from a previous installment actually have a song that calls for actual revolution over not paying the tickets:

They also maintain quite the twitter feed and occasionally make even international splashes with their Youtube videos (The only line you need to understand is „Is mir egal“, which translates to „I don’t care“.):

This sketch, performed by two british variety actors (and tumblers) is a german ritual for generations by now — despite the fact that it is indeed performed in english, without any german subtitles.

Millions of germans will devote about 15 minutes sometime at new years eve to watch this clip. Slavishly. If there is no TV, modern germans will happily gather in a corner of their chosen party location, huddle around the biggest phone screen they can find and fire up YouTube.

Why?

For once, this sketch is hilarious. I mean, look at the butler stumbling over the stuffed tiger, that is solid comedic gold. And the voices he makes!

The other reason? Frankly, I have no idea. Ritual. Like the thing with the Berliner, Pfannkuchen, Kreppel, Krapfen that we insist on gobbling down at the same time. (The vast regional variety of names for food is another post. Rest assured that when ordering a Pfannkuchen, you’ll get vastly different things, depending on where you order it)

While I was doing research for Terrifying German Culture Hour, something occurred to me:

German TV, especially in the 70ies and 80ies had way less advertising than comparable shows in the US.

That sounds like a trivial „so what?“ insight, but it is actually huge:

For starters, they did of course import TV shows from the US and aired them (dubbed) in Germany. But, where the US original would have three to four ad segments, the german one would have one or two.

And those blocks would actually be in the mathematical middle of the show, not where the showrunners intended them to be. So, we would watch the A‐Team, the van would race through some gate, a rocket launcher gets cocked, the screen goes black… and then comes back to show the conclusion. No ad‐break. We thought those pauses were normal!

On the other hand, the german ad‐breaks would then happen kinda mid‐sentence. „yes, I love it when a plan comes… “ ad‐jingle, Mainzelmännchen, a few advertisements, possibly with Prilblumen, more Mainzelmännchen, then „yes, I love it when a plan comes together. Get ‚em B.A.!“

Again, we thought that was normal.

The completely other thing: Anything that got aired after 20:00 came without any advertisement. So when the germans took Love Boat and remade it as Das Traumschiff, or General Hospital, remade as Die Schwarzwaldklinik, they not only made these things so very very german, but..

…also expanded it to about 90 to 120 minutes, sans ad breaks. In case the implications aren’t immediately clear to you: Love Boat is a show that has a one‐hour slot. That means 40 minutes plus advertising, with the arc of suspense optimized to having three mini‐cliffhangers and a satisfying finale.

They took this format, stretched it to more than double the time and reworked the arc of suspense to not have the three mini‐cliffhangers. The result was rather plodding and, compared to anything from the US, slow.

The real kicker here is that due to the bureaucracy of german public tv stations, this sort of plodding and timing became the defacto standard of german tv productions for decades. The main production company is still adhering to the formulas laid down in that era, instead of doing more KLIMBIM:

Even germans often mistake the phenomena known as „New German Wave“ for just an assortment of weird stuff. In reality, this cambrian explosion of new styles and bands paved the way for a variety of genres in Germany. Most bands went away quietly afterwards, some got (in)famous, and others stuck around for the next few decades.

Even americans probably know Trio and their „Da da da“, the stereotypical german nihilstic dadaism — after all, it featured in a Volkswagen ad.

What people didn’t quite know is that Trio basically did all the things that you would expect from avantgarde punk. And, because this is germany, they of course included axes in their performance, as well as Bommerlunder:

Awesome, isn’t it? Alas, this takes us away from the punk I wanted to point out today, so I won’t go into the details of her (in my opinion) much better song. Listen to it anyway, I might have something to say about it at some other point…

Contemporaries of Nena, and probably as iconic were Extrabreit, and their gleeful song about a burning school hyped schoolkids of at least two generations:

But the point of this particular post is Punk, and I would fail you if I wouldn’t mention the two big fishes in the small pond of german punkrock: Die Ärzte (out of Berlin!) and Die Toten Hosen, hailing from Düsseldorf (Not Cologne!) Fans from either band tended to maintain some sort of snobbish rivalvry against the other band, firmly believing that „their“ punk gods were clearly superior.

In style, Die Ärzte were definitely a bit more silly, whereas Die Toten Hosen could get outright political and serious at times.

To illustrate, see this Toten Hosen song about daddy hanging himself in the attic, dressed up as santa claus:

(the monologue at the beginning? The german dub of Leslie Nielsens speech in the second Naked Gun movie. I’ll get into the pecularities of dubbing a lot later…)

As you can probably guess by the toilet humour, Die Ärzte were afraid of nothing when it came to lyrics, so they had funny and life‐affirming songs about

incest

bestiality

the monster in the closet

the german chancellor beating up his wife

spontaneously exploding people

bondage

people being literally scalped

and so on. Unsurprisingly their albums got banned quite often, to „protect the youth“. The only possible answer to that, of course, was a song explaining all the BDSM fetishes in clinical detail, set to a video of dystopian censors destroying their stuff: